10 nonfiction authors receive $40,000 Whiting grants for books-in-progress

By The Associated Press on December 13, 2024.

NEW YORK (AP) – Authors of books-in-progress on subjects ranging from Edgar Allan Poe to subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz are among this year’s 10 recipients of $40,000 Whiting grants for nonfiction.

The Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grants, established in 2016, have previously gone to such acclaimed authors as George Packer, Ilyon Woo and Meghan O’Rourke.

Recipients announced Friday by the Whiting Foundation include Emily Ogden’s “Frailties: How Poe Helps Us Live with Ourselves,” Heather Ann Thompson’s “Fear and Fury: Bernhard Goetz and the Rebirth of White Vigilantism in America History” and Hannah Zeavin’s “All Freud’s Children: A Story of Inheritance.”

Grants also were awarded for Ronald Williams II’s “Black Embassy: TransAfrica and the Struggle for Foreign Policy Justice,” Nadim Roberts’ “The Highway,” Hettie O’Brien’s “Diminishing Returns,” Sarah Esther Maslin’s “Nothing Stays Buried” and Arun Kundnani’s “I Rise in Fire: H. Rap Brown, Jamil Al-Amin, and the Long Revolution.”

The other two recipients were James Duesterberg’s “Final Fantasy: A Secret History of the Present” and Leah Broad’s “This Woman’s War: Women and Music in World War II.”

“The 2024 grantees’ wide-ranging projects chronicle the experience of the individual in society and their effect on society in turn,” the Whiting foundation’s director of literary programs, Courtney Hodell, said in a statement. “These gifted writers examine large and sometimes frightening forces, breaking them down into their constituent parts in order to understand and defang them. It is brave work that we are proud to support.”

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